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Cooper Harriss

Rave on, Eliot Rosewater | Harriss on God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

Cooper Harriss   I take satisfaction in observing the ways that Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater rehearses with some precision a number of specific themes I’ve discussed in the first four installments of this project. The title’s benediction (“God bless you!”), which we see recur among the townspeople even to the point of betrayal, registers secularism’s religious unconscious, mirroring …

I, John, Saw, or MAKE RELIGION LIVE! | Harriss on Cat’s Cradle

Cooper Harriss   The company line on Cat’s Cradle concerns Vonnegut’s invention of a religion—Bokononism—to satirize his contemporary vagaries of knowledge and authority. See the cat? See the cradle? Religion is a lie, the story goes; it’s not true but an invented dimension of human cultures. Like the lies we tell our children, religion arouses fear, provides comfort, establishes meaning, …

The Banality of Irony | Harriss on Mother Night

Cooper Harriss   Mother Night finds Vonnegut back on terra firma, inhabiting the near past and present tense for the first time as he works out the vagaries of postwar life, coming to terms with virtue’s erosion and the illusion of innocence. Still, something is amiss. “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be very careful about …

Shaping Our Ends | Harriss on The Sirens of Titan

Cooper Harriss     In college I worked summers at a camp near the North Carolina coast, an outpost so remote that an evening’s entertainment often took the form of riding the free ferry some three miles across the Neuse River and back. On one occasion I struck up a conversation with a fellow passenger, a local commercial fisherman who …

What Is the Soul of a Man? | Harriss on Player Piano

Vonnegut’s Ghost in the Machine M. Cooper Harriss   Reading Player Piano conjured an old song that I’ve enjoyed returning to for the past couple of weeks. Not unlike the way a player piano engineers sound from collected data, the record of an earlier performance replicated with some precision, I know this song as a mechanical reproduction of Blind Willie …